Tag: 5 things you should know about

Had a lovely weekend, full of nothing much to report. Just a nice lazy watch TV, websurf, and hermit.

Lacking real content, here’s some interesting things to look at:

• The Mosex Index
  If you’re a person who enjoys erotica, you’ll know that the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because there’s an awful lot of it available out there on the net, which beats hanging out in dingy bookstores in bad parts of town for comfort or convenience (although you cannot actually beat the sociological enjoyment of frequenting such establishments), and a curse because there’s an awful lot of really bad stuff out there. There are, of course, sites that purport to rate various content providers, but in this particular genre, personal taste is even more important than usual. What I enjoy may be of absolutely no interest to you, and visa versa.

  Fortunately, someone is trying to conquer that very problem, as featured in a recent issue of Wired:

  Daniel Gluck, executive director of the Museum of Sex (NSFW) in New York, sympathizes with the situation as well — so much so, he’s trying to do something about it.

  The result is the fledgling MoSex Index (NSFW), an attempt to combine the best of social content with “taste networking.”

  “Our social content engine is similar to Digg or Reddit, where members can post content and others can rate it. Based on content thresholds, who is doing the rating, karma and reputation, links make it to the homepage,” Daniel says.

  “But — and I think this is an extremely important aspect of the project — we’ve also incorporated a collaborative filtering element. On other sites, you rate or (don’t) rate; we have a degree of rating based on a 7-point Likert scale that adds weight to your like or dislike. We take that intelligence and form ‘taste profiles,’ which combine to form ‘taste networks.’ When people in your taste network find content they like, that content gets recommended to you.”

  I spent some idle time on Saturday, and did manage to find some interesting sites that I’d previously been aware of. The site is currently a bit sluggish and intermittently available, since the Wired article has generated a huge spike in their traffic. If you’re at all interested in finding online erotic material, this is a site to keep an eye on.

• Ray’s little ditty
  Courtesy of ZeFrank, here’s a little ditty composed by an unknown father to help his daughter deal with stressful days. Give it a listen, and see if it doesn’t make you smile.

  (one of Ze’s readers also did an extended remix, setting the whole thing to a techno beat. I’m sure there will be a video soon. Stay tuned.)

• Julie Gribble
  Someone posted a link to alert people that Atlanta native Julie Gribble was doing a benefit show was for the Atlanta Human Society. While I have prior commitments that day, I thought I’d check out her samples to see if she was the sort of artist I tend to enjoy, and the answer was, based on listening to a few 2 minute clips of her songs, a resounding yes. Go give her a spin.

• Dance Like Buddha
  Actually, i think it’s more like Kali than Buddha, but who cares. This is an outstanding video clip.

• Bujold audio books
  Fans of Lois McMaster Bujold may be interested to find some audio books available online at audible.com. Thanks to filkferengi for the pointer.

Finally, Happy New Year to all my Jewish friends. May the year ahead be full of light and joy for each and every one of you.

I often get scolded for finding Good Stuff here and there and forgetting to tell people about it. So here’s the beginning of an irregular feature, where I collect cool things for your consideration. I’m hoping this will be more than just link sausage, but we’ll see how long my attention span holds out.

• Around the World With Nellie Bly and Drawing Conclusions
  Around the world… and Drawing Conclusions are a pair of newspaper features prepared weekly by Glenn Falls Post-Star editor and rec.arts.comics.strips regular Mike Peterson. Each week, Around the World… takes a focused look at a current events story, while Drawing Conclusions examines how editorial cartoons address the world around us. Aimed primarily at middle-schoolers, these features are an excellent resource for teachers, whether public, private, or home-school, and are well written and engaging enough to be thought provoking to adults as well. Go check out Nellie Bly’s webpage.

  As a bonus, Mike’s blog is syndicated right here to Livejournal by adding nellieblogs to your friends list. Mike is definitely one of the people who makes rec.arts.comics.strips worth reading on a daily basis, and his blog contains useful thoughtfood as well.

• Medium Large
  Speaking of comics, there are any number of webcomics you just have to read, and first among them is Ces Marciuliano’s wickedly funny pop-culture riff Medium Large. By day, Marciuliano is largely unknown as the current talent behind the syndicated strip Sally Forth, but in his spare time, he reels off one of the most hysterical and off-kilter webstrips on the net, five days a week. While the strip does include some amusing repeat gags, most notably centered on the “hit WB show Teenage Girl President”, the strip is at its best when it takes right angles to pop-culture icons. The BC parody in Week 46 is one of my favourites.

  Medium Large can be syndicated to Livejournal via mediumlarge.

• Inside The Actors Studio
  While its improbable that most of you aren’t familiar with Jame’s Lipton’s amazing interview program on the Bravo Network, this is my journal and you have to indulge me. Truth is, I long ago ceased bothering to tune in when my favourite actors appear on talk-and-gawk shows (Leno, Letterman, and the like) because its really just another performance, most of the time. Inside The Actors Studio is one of the few places where your really get a chance to see the people who craft most of our better entertainment as real people. Lipton is probably one of the best interviewers working on television: prepared, probing, and clearly fascinated with his subjects. He also knows what many journalists have never learned, which is when to shut up and let his subject talk, and when to draw his subject towards the topic he wants to explore. It doesn’t hurt that he’s an unashamed fan in every sense of the word, and because he focuses on the life and work of his subjects rather than whatever their current project is, it humanizes the various actors and performers who appear on his stage and gives us a glimpse behind the masks and glamours. There are many worse ways to spend an hour than watching someone have an hour long chat about the craft of performance with James Lipton.

  If you don’t get the Bravo Network, Inside the Actors Studio can now be downloaded from iTunes.

• Paste Magazine
  If you’re a music junkie like me, and want to keep up with what’s going on outside the mainstream, then you need Decatur, GA based Paste Magazine. The magazine is jam-packed each issue with well-written articles reviewing albums, films, books, and concerts, but what really makes it worth the $8 you’ll plop down every issue is the CD, which contains a couple of dozen tracks from a variety of mostly independent artists. Some you’ll have heard of, some you won’t. You won’t like every track. But good gosh, what a great grab-bag of new music, every issue, for half of what normal CD costs.

• The Show with Zefrank
  Who is Zefrank? I have no idea. I don’t even remember now how I found this very odd video blog. Every weekday, The Show with Zefrank features about 3-5 minutes of stream of conscious monologuing, commentary, and reaction to viewer comments from this Brooklyn-based humorist. “Good morning, sports racers,” he signs on every morning, and then he’s off to the races himself with whatever has caught his eye, talking directly into the closely zoomed camera. The pace of the monologues is frentic and sharply edited, and the commentary is at turns thought provoking, amusing, and sometimes just downright silly, and I’ve grown to look forward to my daily moment of Zefrank every morning. He’s thinking so you don’t have to….give him a try.